Prime snide kookrant

I was surprised when I read the excerpt from the sneering letter to the editor-in-chief of Science magazine — it’s someone patronizingly chiding the little woman with the big job at a science journal in decline. It’s bad enough that it’s so condescendingly goofy, but it’s also complaining that Science has foolishly jumped into the “debate” about global climate change. There is no debate; it’s happening, there is a substantial anthropogenic component, and the science is rather firmly settled, so what would be then inappropriate is refusing to address an important environmental issue.

But then I read the full letter, and learned two things that made it even more laughable: 1) it’s an open letter published on the wacky denialist website, What’s Up With That, which means it’s going to be instantly ignored by any credible scientist, as Marcia McNutt is, and 2) it goes on and on and on and on. It’s absurdly preachy and unprofessional, and tells me that the author has no idea what kind of letter would be published by the magazine.

Further, McNutt is a professor of marine geophysics at Stanford, and what impresses the kook who wrote that letter?

McNutt is a NAUI-certified scuba diver and she trained in underwater demolition and explosives handling with the U.S. Navy UDT and SEAL Team.

The comments are also delusional. People are opining that Science is a dying journal. Really?

Climate change denialists are just about as out-of-touch and clownish as evolution denialists.

The Great Troll War of 2013

The internet is taking an interesting tack: there’s increasing concern about doing something about trolls. I think it’s a bit of backlash, because really, they’ve gone far, far overboard — the volume of raw hate and stupidity in some of the worst places on the net is appalling — and I also think internet culture is changing as it expands beyond its early population of nerds.

We’re all still trying to figure out what to do about the troll infestations, though. Lindy West has her personal answer: don’t ignore them, feed them ’til their idiocy is a matter of public mockery. And it’s all because the trolls are reaching new lows in their efforts to silence people, especially women.

Cumulatively, the sheer volume of hate that we’re expected to shoulder, in silence, every day, is wearing a lot of people out and shutting down rational discourse. Female bloggers are being hounded off the internet. Teenage girls are being hounded off the earth. There’s no good solution, but we have to do what we can to stop these people—unmask them, shame them, mock them, cement their status as social pariahs—for our own sanity and for those whose armor isn’t so thick (upgrade yo greaves, son).

Unmasking trolls, as we’ve seen, can produce some tangible and satisfying results. And I don’t mean just in a punitive way, I mean in a changing-the-larger-culture kind of way. People need to understand and internalize that online harassment, violent hate speech, rape threats, slut-shaming little girls until they hang themselves, and so on, are express violations of the social contract. They will not be tolerated and they will result in real-life consequences. That’s a long way off, and probably a bit of a pipe dream, but it might be our only hope for cleaning up this shitshow.

Here’s another example of the troll blight: Amanda Berry, the woman who’d been kidnapped and held prisoner in Cleveland for ten years, went to a concert and danced last weekend. Normal people can appreciate how great that must have felt, to be free at last and to be able to just have fun for an evening.

Not the trolls.

On CNN over the weekend, Nelly told Erin Burnett, “What stuck with me most was that she had a smile on her face. That’s one of the most impressive things to me, considering everything she had been through … I thought, wow, that was special.” But Burnett was too busy being amazed that “She looked totally normal.”

Burnett’s concerned astonishment was charitable compared to what the lowest form of opinion generators – Internet commenters – had to say about Berry’s newly reignited social life. “It’s just odd given the years of abuse she suffered. Normally she would not have that kind of trust or comfort. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t make sense,” wrote one concerned ABC News commenter, while another more bluntly decided, “It seems to me she was enjoying it and is gonna use her ordeal to cash in.” Many were concerned that she appeared with a man who stood behind her and warmly put his arm around her and kissed her neck while she was onstage. Or, as some of the ABC commenters decided, he was a “dirt bag hanging all over her,” who “groped” and “pawed” her. A CBS News commenter more generously decided she looked “pretty hot.” And 645 comments later on NBC, Berry had plenty of well-wishers but also comments about her eyebrow piercing, and how she doesn’t look like “a real victim….lol.” And of course, if you want to plumb the absolute bottom of the barrel, there’s YouTube, where Berry is being accused of “milking everything she’s getting.”

You don’t expect much beyond a gaping, misspelled void when you stare into the cold dark place that is Internet comments. But what’s appalling – if not entirely surprising – is realizing that the judging and shaming that rots the soul of online community goes that deep. It goes all the way down to picking on a woman who spent a decade being abused, because she had the nerve to go outside and be happy.

Yeah, it’s time to fight back.

Whoa. A commenter linked to a tumblr where a game developer dumps the hate mail he got after changing the stats on a gun in Call of Duty. You can’t read that without realizing there is a deep sociological problem here.

You know, if I’d known about that behavior back when I had kids at home who were playing those games and others online, there are a few things I would have done. I would not have told them they don’t get to play; nor would I have taken their internet connection away. But I definitely would have sat them down to read that site and I would have told them, “Don’t be that asshole. I would be ashamed if you had such a poor sense of perspective.”

I think that’s where it has to begin. Don’t engage in such behavior yourself, but also tell your friends, your relatives, and the people you encounter in those games that they are being terrible people. Don’t spare your boyfriend or your daughter or your mother, either, it shouldn’t matter how close they are to you…except maybe that the closer they are, the more you should care about their behavior. If you find yourself playing against people who say such things, report them, block them if the game allows you, and just stop playing with them.

You are not more manly when you lose an online game and think you can recoup some honor by threatening to rape your opponent. You are more pathetic.

Ian Murphy is going to jail…

…for videotaping a policeman and interviewing National Organization for Marriage wackaloons with a dildo. His appeal has been denied so he’s expected to turn himself in to serve the remainder of his sentence…a few weeks.

What has happened to American journalism? A reporter gets arrested for mocking some walking talking dildos with a small plastic version, yet the apologists wanking on the opinion pages of the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal, performing for the pleasures of the bankers and other bloated pigs who’ve been fucking over the country, get off free. As long as we’re arresting journalists, there are a few articles by Friedman and Brooks that are true crimes…and hey, shouldn’t Arianna Huffington be doing hard time for poisoning the left wing press and turning it into a joke?

Shorter Ian Murphy.

Why was Gary Younge’s article removed?

How odd. An article was removed from The Guardian website, and now only this note has been left in its place.

This article has been taken down on 14 July 2013 pending investigation.

I guess they’ll investigate away. Meanwhile, you can read the article as originally posted.

Open season on black boys after a verdict like this
Posted:Sun, 14 Jul 2013 07:25:00 GMTPosted:2013-07-14T08:07:42Z

Calls for calm after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin are empty words for black families

Let it be noted that on this day, Saturday 13 July 2013, it was still deemed legal in the US to chase and then shoot dead an unarmed young black man on his way home from the store because you didn’t like the look of him.

The killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last year was tragic. But in the age of Obama the acquittal of George Zimmerman offers at least that clarity. For the salient facts in this case were not in dispute. On 26 February 2012 Martin was on his way home, minding his own business armed only with a can of iced tea and a bag of Skittles. Zimmerman pursued him, armed with a 9mm handgun, believing him to be a criminal. Martin resisted. They fought. Zimmerman shot him dead.

Who screamed. Who was stronger. Who called whom what and when and why are all details to warm the heart of a cable news producer with 24 hours to fill. Strip them all away and the truth remains that Martin’s heart would still be beating if Zimmerman had not chased him down and shot him.

There is no doubt about who the aggressor was here. The only reason the two interacted at all, physically or otherwise, is that Zimmerman believed it was his civic duty to apprehend an innocent teenager who caused suspicion by his existence alone.

Appeals for calm in the wake of such a verdict raise the question of what calm there can possibly be in a place where such a verdict is possible. Parents of black boys are not likely to feel calm. Partners of black men are not likely to feel calm. Children with black fathers are not likely to feel calm. Those who now fear violent social disorder must ask themselves whose interests are served by a violent social order in which young black men can be thus slain and discarded.

But while the acquittal was shameful it was not a shock. It took more than six weeks after Martin’s death for Zimmerman to be arrested and only then after massive pressure both nationally and locally. Those who dismissed this as a political trial (a peculiar accusation in the summer of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden) should bear in mind that it was politics that made this case controversial.

Charging Zimmerman should have been a no-brainer. He was not initially charged because Florida has a “stand your ground” law whereby deadly force is permitted if the person “reasonably believes” it is necessary to protect their own life, the life of another or to prevent a forcible felony.

Since it was Zimmerman who stalked Martin, the question remains: what ground is a young black man entitled to and on what grounds may he defend himself? What version of events is there for that night in which Martin gets away with his life? Or is it open season on black boys after dark?

Zimmerman’s not guilty verdict will be contested for years to come. But he passed judgement on Trayvon that night summarily.

“Fucking punks,” Zimmerman told the police dispatcher that night. “These assholes. They always get away.”

So true it’s painful. And so predictable it hurts.

I don’t know what’s wrong with it. Maybe the editors noticed a typo.

Tilling the fields of the enlightenment

While I was preoccupied with promoting women’s rights in Ireland, Time magazine apparently decided that atheists were miserly skinflints who lacked a social conscience. Ed is encouraging a letter writing campaign — send your disagreement to letters@time.com — but maybe we should think about sending a mission of atheist care workers to New York to enter their editorial offices and labor to bring them out of their wretched ignorance. It seems a shame that supposedly literate, intelligent workers are doomed to be doing their job so poorly.

Those are really good questions

Watching the Sunday news shows, which have become all Perfidious Snowden all the time, David Sirota asks some most excellent questions. These two in particular struck me as important:

9. Snowden’s decision to flee the United States has often been depicted as an act of treason unto itself. The idea is that whereas Daniel Ellsberg was a hero for blowing the whistle and remaining in the United States, Snowden is a coward for blowing the whistle and fleeing. Left largely unmentioned is the big change between the time of Ellsberg’s disclosures and today: this White House is waging an unprecedented campaign to criminalize whistleblowing; it sometimes tortures whistleblowers; and it claims the right to extra-judicially assassinate American citizens who criticize the government but haven’t even been formally charged for a single crime. In light of this, why have most media outlets not bothered to even ask whether Snowden’s location outside the United States is, unto itself, a response to these troubling changes in U.S. government policy?

10. And finally, perhaps the most damning question of all: Why are so many media outlets far more interested in the minute details of Edward Snowden’s life and location than in the potential crimes against millions of Americans that he exposed?

Yeah, that last one. On CNN, I saw some jerk standing in front of a map of the world spending 10 minutes tracing the route of Snowden’s flight from Hong Kong to Moscow, then going through likely countries he might end up in, and talking about the state of their extradition treaties to the US. Why? Are we going to marshal the citizenry to strap on their handguns and fly off to Iceland to patrol the airport?

The US media have become criminal colluders in oppression, instead of the watchdogs for citizen rights that they ought to be.

Announcing…FtBConscience

This blog network has decided to put on a show. We go to conferences a lot, we have conversations with all kinds of atheists, we have things to say and we know you do, too, so we have decided to put on our own conference, with our themes and interests. And because we’re a blog network, we’re entirely comfortable with doing it all in our pajamas, so we propose to do this entirely with the technology our readers have on hand already: the internet. And further, we’re going to do it entirely for free — if you can get on the internet, you can access the talks and panels. If you can type, you can converse with everyone in our chat room.

A conference for atheists with a conscience

An Online Conference
19-21 July 2013

FtBCon is a free, online conference organized by the Freethought Blogs network. It will take place on July 19-21 and will focus on social justice, technology, and the future of the freethought movement. Without travel, registration, or hotel costs, FtBCon will be accessible to freethinkers around the world. Conference sessions will be held through Google+ hangouts, and attendees will have the opportunity to interact with each other in chat rooms and to submit questions to moderators.

We are currently assembling our schedule. If you or your organization are interested in participating, submit your session ideas for consideration by e-mailing PZ Myers with a proposal.

See that last bit? The event is a month away, and our schedule is filling up, but we also want to make this a participatory event that draws out your voices. If you’re part of a group that you’d like to see represented, if you have something valuable to say that fits into our overall theme, contact me soon and we’ll see if we can fit you into our programming grid.

There is a long list of scheduled speakers at FtBCon.org. Want to listen to them? Want to join them? Come right here to FreeThoughtBlogs on 19-21 July.

Quit picking on Marissa Powell!

All right, as we’re seeing splashed all over the news now, Miss Utah, Marissa Powell, fum-fuhed a question about resolving income inequities. Here she goes:

And I say, so what? No one expects a dissertation in the feel-good blurb you’re allowed to give in a beauty pageant. She clearly hadn’t thought about the question before, and was simply floundering to come up with an answer…and the one she stumbled out wasn’t inherently bad. She’s trying to recommend education as a solution.

So, not an inherently wrong answer, poorly expressed, and contrived on the fly by a young woman who wasn’t really prepared for it. I dare any of the people who are dressing her down to get on the air before a national audience, get a question on a subject they’ve never really thought about, and answer it as well.

What’s really going on here is an effort to find supporting evidence for a bias that women in beauty pageants are stupid — and the media are happily jumping on one instance of a clumsy, misspoken answer as confirmation.

Television “science”

Are you a film crew person looking for work in the UK? Multiple opportunities have opened up for the crew for a documentary!

A new Covent Garden-based film company seeks a producer of marketing and distribution, a researcher/presenter, a camera operator, a sound person, a runner, and an editor, for its first documentary, called Laughing with Women. Why are women, on average, slightly less funny than men? Does gold-digging in particular impair women’s joke-making ability? If women publicly reject gold-digging, do they become as funny, or funnier than men?

If the radical and revealing street-based social experiment at the centre of our documentary proves gold-digging does make women less funny (as pre-production research suggests) then our findings will make headlines around the world, our film’s two minute teaser trailer attached to all those news and blog articles. The full documentary will be shot to a broadcast-quality standard and format, giving mainstream television companies worldwide the opportunity to purchase broadcasting rights (if they’re feeling brave enough) whilst we maintain a virtually guaranteed revenue stream from our already established hardcore of supporters and fans around the world, who, along with everyone else we intrigue, will be able to enjoy Laughing with Women on newly launched pay-per-view channel, Vimeo on Demand (VoD) – where VoD itself takes a very modest 10% cut. The documentary has the potential to be translated into several languages – gold-digging a familiar if hidden story in every country, until now.

Positions available…

Producer of marketing and distribution

Researcher/presenter

Camera person

Sound person

Editor

All positions paid at the minimum national wage or above, to be negotiated.

Shooting dates…

The main shoot, testing the documentary’s key hypothesis, and the kind of fireworks it will generate, will take place from August 1st, for 10 days, in central London. Eight to ten other shooting days will be organized for soon after. If interested in getting involved, please email your show-reel and/or CV, along with a paragraph or two saying hello, explaining in a little detail why you are specifically interested in working on Laughing with Women – and what your individual take on it all might be – also outlining your availability. Interesting respondents will be contacted for a Covent Garden meeting soon, where the whole plan, and a closely linked follow-up project can be discussed.

That isn’t a documentary. They’re not building a story around an established science fact, they’re inventing a premise that they simply assume is true, and are then designing an “experiment” (more likely a contrived set of sight gags) to “prove” their claims on video. I can roughly predict what they’re going to do: they’re going to approach women, insult them by suggesting that they’re venal gold-diggers, and then demonstrate that angry women don’t have much of a sense of humor about sexist assmonkeys harassing them. Hypothesis proven! Of course, if women were actually funnier than the men in their sample, you know that wouldn’t get aired — they have a prejudice, and by god, they’re going to make it appear true.

And then they hope that people will be “brave enough” to make their video go viral when it confirms conventional bigotry. If their little dog-and-pony show doesn’t get picked up any broadcasters, it isn’t because they’re afraid to pander to stereotypes — turn on your TV and look, that’s never a problem — but because this “documentary” will be so patently slanted and dishonest that it is a slap in the face to real documentaries everywhere.

Wait a minute…they’re looking for a people to do camera and sound, a produce, a presenter, and an editor, for a show that is going to be a series of confrontations and requires almost no writing. So there is basically no crew at all right now, just a no-talent hack sitting on his ass in his office dreaming of putting together a show to prove to the world that women lack a sense of humor and are all gold-digging bitches. He sounds like every MRA in the world.

I called it. This is the dream of no-talent hack Tom Martin, who brings nothing to the project other than a resentment of women.

Jonah Lehrer: he’s baaaaack

Lehrer has landed a new book deal. This has sparked justifiable disgust: Maria Konnikova explains why.

Lehrer is not the writer who simply made up a few Bob Dylan quotes and self-plagiarized (the way he’s portrayed in recent accounts of his latest book deal). He is the writer who got the science wrong, repeatedly, who made up facts, misrepresented information, betrayed editors, and lied, over and over and over again, for many years, in multiple venues, not just in a single book. He is, in other words, the writer and journalist who went against the basic tenets of the profession, and did so many times over. He is the surgeon who botched surgery after surgery, the lawyer who screwed up case after case, the engineer whose oh-so-pretty designs toppled after a year or two, not once, but multiple times, and on and on. Why, then, is he not seeing the consequences the way he would have necessarily done in most other professions? Why is he instead getting the equivalent of a fresh docket of cases or a new departmental job: a coveted book deal with a prominent publisher?

He’s slick. He writes with a glib authority, and is a master of superficial plausibility, able to whip out a snappy footnote with a reference just obscure enough to tickle recognition in the brains of knowledgeable readers and to wow the yahoos. He sounds smart. But there’s a real vacancy at the core.

He’s not good at the science. He’s a poor researcher. He’s not a good writer — he churns words around and knows the form, but the content isn’t there.

So now he’s going to paste together another book that will clutter the shelves and deprive better writers of support. Konnikova suggests an action we can take:

And that’s why we, the readers, are the only possible villain—that is, if we choose to be, by continuing to pay attention to Lehrer, by continuing to cover his work, by buying his new book and reviewing it and drawing attention to it. By making it possible for this book of love to be another best-seller.

So let’s make a choice. Let’s not do it. Let’s show Simon & Schuster that they backed a losing horse that has run its last. Let the book flop, not sell. Don’t buy it, resist the urge “just to see” what the fuss is all about. We make Jonah Lehrer. Without an audience, he is nothing, plain and simple.

Won’t work. She’s preaching to the choir — the people who read science blogs already know Lehrer’s reputation, and won’t be tempted in the slightest to buy yet another bit of hackwork from the guy. I have no plans to every pay a penny for that book, that’s for sure.

Lehrer has made a brilliant move, actually. He’s writing a pop psych book about love. He’s going to wave the tattered banner of his past science writing to argue that he has the authority to speak for science on a matter of everyday importance, and his precious scholarly style will add weight to that claim in the minds of his new target audience. And that audience isn’t us. His new audience will be the people who watch Oprah to learn about science.

In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that Oprah was part of his pitch. This is a book tailor-made for that show: the flawed writer seeking redemption (who also happens to be young and attractive), the pseudo-highbrow style, the subject matter, the “counter-intuitive” pronouncements that will actually line up well with what the audience wants to hear.

I’ll bet you that right now the publicists are thinking up copy to send to the weekday afternoon talk shows, and that by this time next year Lehrer will be working that circuit. And that he’ll make big buckets of money selling off the sad bleeding shreds of his integrity.